Well, no. I'm not Karen Blixen.

But every now and then the nostalgia bites, oh, how it bites...

We just got done watching the pilot for a new TV show called "Life is Wild". It's... kind of... feeble, really. The storyline ranges from the improbable to the patronizing to fake-pathetic. I've looked the thing up on the internets, later, and it's been described as an African edition of "7th Heaven", which is the sort of saccharine syrupy preachy nonsense that rdeck and I were almost literally tearing our eyes out with rusty farm implements rather than watch - and yes, there is a lot of that in it. Take a nice but dysfunctional family from "civilization" - Papa the vet who wants to Do Good; Second-Wife-Mama who used to be a high-powered Manhattan divorce lawyer but is now gung ho to restore and run a run-down safari lodge operation; Sainted Late Lamented First Wife Mama whose family's "ancestral" lodge this is, and whose borderline alcoholic father still snoozes his afternoons away on the falling-down porch; mix'n'match kids from two marriages, "his and hers and ours" - a pretty blonde teen queen who bemoans the lack of MySpace, a rebel without a cause bad boy who wanted to get his lip pierced back home in good old New York and who is the cause they are all there (and much angst is hung thereon), a precious and sensitive younger brother who is also idiot enough to wander off into the bush by himself causing the entire family to scare off after him, and a younger girl who is precious enough to be afraid of bears and tigers and monsters outside when the animals howl (and who is reassured that there aren't any bears or tigers in Africa, but then says, "but you didn't say anything about the monsters!"

Throw in the Big White Boss who is running the hugely successful lodge next door (and is slated to be the villain of the piece, you just know it), his two perfect children who seem to have stepped straight out of the casting pool at MGM Starlets Incorporated, and a couple of black characters who appear to be poised for a career as Token Native Sidekick and/or Temporary Romantic Interest (at least as long as the AMerican teens are there anyway and to be tearfully waved goodbye to, no doubt, in the final episode after a year of living dangerously, as it were).

Oh, it's a soapie. A YA soapie, at that.

But, oh. Africa.

I sat there watching the spreading acacia trees over the waving golden grasses; I watched vivid sunsets paint themselves over the sky; I listened to the orphaned lion cub's incessant chatter and remembered the one that I was once deeply privileged to be able to hold in my lap (and yes they DO talk all the time). And I'm suddenly missing it, the wide skies, the veldt, the beasts of woods and plains, the great herds of impalas, the stately elephants, the giraffes, the cheetahs, the lions.

It gets under your skin, Africa does. And stays there. And every now and then that part of itself that it leaves within you makes you strain to hear distant drums, or a lion grunting in the purple twilight, or the rain coming down in tropical sheets from the sky. The smell of it, the smell of dust and sweat and animal musk and raw red earth and the delicate scent of the acacias. The colours of it, the purple jacaranda trees and the scarlet flame trees and the brittle golden yellow of the savannah and the crimsons and molten golds of the sunsets. The sounds of it, the whisper of wind in the dry grass, the scream of an animal, the laughter and chatter from the marketplaces where the women gather, carrying half the world in a massively unbalanced bales of stuff on their heads, often apparently packed with a degree of slipshod carelessness that makes you want to run behind them with a safety net to catch escaping items which somehow all stay put in their place.

I didn't have a farm in Africa. But I had three houses there, lived in them, grew up in them, left them all behind. And sometimes I still miss them and the beautiful, powerful, wounded, astonishing, brave, corrupt, wide-horizon'd continent on which they still crouch, giving other families, other children, a sheltering roof.

Forgive me while I go and dream of drums tonight.

When I was little, it was such a tradition - every year, January 1, the TV wouldcarry (live!) teh Neujaahrkonzert from the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra. Audience dressed up to the nines, in a hall so stuffed with flowers that from some camera angles it seemed amazing that they had got any people in there at all. And some of the waltzes and polkas were accompanied by choreographed dances in the halls of Schonbrunn and other palaces of Imperial Vienna - dancers with floaty chiffon dresses and lavish gowns and jewels in their hair dancing on the parquet floors and under the painted ceilings of Old Vienna. Many of the waltzes and polkas one knew - "Tales from the Vienna WOods", "The TritschTratsch Polka" - and others were minor works by the Strauss family, or overtures from Viennese operettas - it was part of my own heritage, part of old Europe, part of who I was growing up when I would get up and dance the beautiful ballets in my own weird little choreographies in my stocking feet, maybe all of six or seven years old, the one-two-three of the waltz running through my blood like an elixir.

We left the old country when I was ten, and after that it was sporadic - we'd catch a Konzert here or there, and the conductors changed, and the music was always a general mixture of Straussiana old and new - but every concert ended in a traditional way, with three encores. THe first was always a mystery, announced on the night, and was yet another waltz or polka, and could be anything. But the second and the third, everyone knew.

There are only a handful of melodies which require no more than one note to be instantly recognized.

And for me... there really is only one waltz.

That first tremulous chord of the "Beautiful Blue Danube" always makes tears come to my eyes - my river, MY river, *mine*, born on its banks, walking on its levees hand in hand with grandpa hearing stories of the times the river froze over and they held horse-drawn sleigh races on the ice, smelling the ripe old mud, thinking about the ancient slow-moving catfish that meandered in its murky depths. Never blue, not where I was born, already an old and muddy river which sometimes stank of rot and of diesel... but my river. MINE. And so is that waltz, that first trembling note, and then the unravelling of that rich tapestry which I know so well, know to the note, which I could cheerfully replace the orchestra conductor and conduct the orchestra in its performance myself.

And then the last encore, the traditional envoi, the Radetzky March, scored (only in Vienna) for orchestra and audience, which comes in with a rhythmic clapping when the conductor turns and leads them to join in.

The PBS carried the 2007 Neujaahrskonzert this year, and TiVo taped it for us, and we always used to watch it live on January 1 but I am no longer six years old and I no longer live in the old country which is in the same timezone and so we watched it tonight. And I am no longer six years old, but the Danube that flows through my heart is still and always blue, and I still, in spirit, dance.

I'm sure most of us have something like that buried inside of us - that music which took a child and transported it to a magic world. May you always remember your own, may you always, in your heart, dance.

Once again, with feeling, from me and from that pirouetting six year old who could not possibly have known where her roads would take her - far from home and yet always standing on the childhood shores of that majestic old river - happy new year.

I don't entirely know what set me off. Not really. I haven't suddenly seen a batch of brand new babies somewhere or a crocodiel of preschoolers meandering across the street, nor even a snailtail of graybeards doddering on the sidewalks - nothing to set off the "time's passing" bells except, well, just time passing.

In various cultures around the world, as well as in times not too long past, I would have been considered either OLD or or on the verge of being so. Instead, in the culture and the time that I live in, I am... oh, dear lord... sliding into that bracket known as "middle age". Which means I can expect to live about as long again as I have lived so far, and if I'm VERY lucky I might live to see my nineties without being senile, sick, or completely solitary. But I'm of an age where earlier generations of my family are gone or are stepping into the realm where the possibilities of going are increased, and I've already had friends who have spent their allotted span of days on this planet. This not to say that I am getting decrepit or that anyone immediately around me is, but I am just... looking back, and my life is a photo album.

It's like I've got all these little sepia thumbnails back there, some starting to fade rather badly - they aren't memories, themselves, but they're mnemonics and if I go and toggle one of them a memory will emerge. Sometimes vivid, sometimes trembling and paper thin and wavering in the slightest breeze like a chiffon veil.

I remember things from my childhood.

I remember the smell of the flowering linden trees in the courtyard of the Orthodox cathedral in Novi Sad, to this day the only place where I believe God lives. I remember the smell of beeswax candles and incense. I am not a churtchgoing person, but there - that place - those gilded and icon-painted walls hold the souls of the people I have once loved.

I remember the scent of lilac.

I remember receiving my first ever award for writing (at school, in winter, wearing horrible Seventies boots and in a sheepskin coat because the awards ceremony was outdoors in November).

I remember sitting in a school library (different school) while a Real Writer talked to my class about herself and her work, and I remember that the dream woke that night as the damp darkness of an English autumn quietly descended outside, and that I became a writer in my heart that day and I never stopped being one since.

I remember the skies of Africa.

I remember a school dance to which I asked a cousin of a roommate of mine, a young Greek god (he really WAS greek [grin]) with curly blond hair and a gorgeous smile and made my roommate (who was planning to ask him herself but I got in first) very jealous - I remember talking quietly to this guy for a long time as we stood in the empty courtyard in the aftermath of the dance, myself with my back against a pillar and him leaning over me with a hand resting on the pillar behind my shoulder, smiling down at me, and yes, the kiss, and then, not long afterwards, learning that some learner driver had hit his motorbike from behind and catapulted him over the handlebars into the path of another incoming car - I remember trying to talk to him on the phone, in teh aftermath of surgery and coma, and crying like a chile because this beautiful vivid human being had completely lost the ability to remember anything at all in the short term and could not even keep straight for the duration of a short phone call to whom he was actually speaking. He was only nineteen.

I remember growing up.

I remember my first year at University, the kid always so easily and brilliantly competent at school brought down and humbled by the workload of the first year at college where I could not rely on memory alone - we covered a year's worth of syllabus in two weeks, in a SINGLE subject, and I took four courses in the first semester. I remember having to learn how to study, from scratch, when I was seventeen. I remember the ivy covered walls of my University, on the slopes of Cape Town's Table Mountain. I remember being the only one smar enough to spot a loophole in one exam that brought me several easy marks (yeah? You want to know?... Really?... [grin}) I remember running with a couple of friends to catch the train down to the next suburb where the cinemas were, grumbling all the way, to go and see "Chariots of Fire", complaining about being dragged to see a sports movie dammit and I had no interest in sport - and coming out in tears and in love and going back to see that movie at least twice more in the theatre (and countless times since). I remember graduating, becoming a postgraduate, graduating THAT, trying to find my blundering way in the world of science and research, fighting with blistering headaches, trying to hold on to a career I had sweated and worked hard for... and then segueing sideways into scientific writing and editing, and losing the headaches I had not forgotten that night in the school library, just... put it on hold, as it were, and all the science years were leavened with poetry, with stories, with at least two unpublished novels.

I remember moving by myself from South Africa to New Zealand, brand new country, knowing nobody, alone, finding my way. I remember finding a temporary job - and through it getting involved in a disastrous relationship that I should have known better than to have gotten involved in but did it anyway because the guy involved made me LAUGH, fatally, and after taht it was easy to believe in things that were pure fantasy. In the aftermath of THAT, I remember meeting a man with whom I connected completely and deeply, who told me on our second date "If you don't want to make this a long-term thing walk away now..." and who ended that relationship, just about a year later, by accusing me of having "expectations" of him and couldn't we just be friends?... I remember the emotional desert which I entered, where even the writing dried up for a full year. and I remember crying inconsolably and without seemingly being able to stop the first time that a man I might care for showed me tenderness I could accept, after about a year of that. I remember that I was terrified of EVERYTHING what that man showed me in a hundred little ways that he loved me and cared for me and would always be there for me, and I eventually married him.

I remember coming to America. ANother new country. Another new start. I remember seeing the Grand Canyon, Niagara Falls, my first glimpse of the fabulous and improbable skyline of New York (that was a movie set. It had to be...) I remember being driven down to the Florida Keys, swimming with dolphins for the second time in my life, tasting alligator, running from a hurricane. I remember writing a book in the office I shared with my husband, with a desk which had started out life as a door but had been coopted as a flat working surface, the office itself part of a converted outbuilding which used to be the garage - when we moved from Florida, at last, I remember going to take a last look at the empty hole that used to be that office, with its dingy brown carpet and stained tiles of its dropped ceiling and bookshelves made of two-by-fours on cinderblocks and I remember crying because this was where "Jin Shei" was born.

And then, closer now, faster, I remember weeping at my first snowfall in Washington state; the vivid garden which bloomed in the spring after an autumn of planting bulbs, my first rhododendron blooms, the frustrations of blackberries; the arrival of two frisky kittens into the household and the passing of an elderly and ornery and increasingly failing character of a cat.

The first summer in Washington, and the aftermath of rdeck's stroke, and his long recovery.

I am thinking of the memories waiting to be made in the months and years to come.

SOmetimes I get scared, or frustrated, or depressed about stuff I really have little control over. Mostly I am a sum of my parts, I am what my life has made me, and I am ridiculously content. And every time I say that I feel like reaching out and knocking on wood because I can see, around me out there in the world, traces of people whose lives have evolved in pictures very different from my own. In pictures of fear and fire and foes, perhaps, with memories of wreckage and ruins and blood where I remember a childhood of a grandmother's love and daffodils and honey from my grandfather's bees. I haven't had a heartbreak-free life - but I have, in context, in perspective, been so utterly and incredilby lucky with my lot in life that sometimes that takes my breath away and I am frightened at how much I owe my destiny.

Last picture. CLose of day, with another summer coming to an end, sitting in a pool of light from my desk lamp, typing this. Asking you all, perhaps, to look at your own albums, and remember.

- as they are every year since 2003. It's an anniversary filled with difficult memories.

Here's an inkling as to why.

( cut for length )

When we were both little, the cousin I always call my sister (in my language she is my sister-from-aunt, which confuses the heck out of everyone who knows that we were both only children...)were always playing catchup. I was born in July, she in APril the following year; I would always turn something, in terms of age, and then she would "Catch up" with me when her birthday came around.

Well, she caught up again today. And I spoke to her on the phone across the many thousands of miles that divide us, to wish her happy catch-up day.

And neither of us knows how we got to be the age we are. It seems like only yesterday that we were little girls too enthralled by our games and fantasies and the safe, secure cocoons of our childhoods - and overnight, almost, we turned into adults, people who own their own homes, people who (in her case, anyway) have children, people who have careers, who have bank accounts, who pay bills every month, whose hair is turning or, in my case, is already completely gray. I look back, sometimes, and the years are like a rollercoaster - and I can't see the place where it began any more.

One grows, so fast. One grows older.

Heppy birthday, coz. Wait till July. I'll escape again into the future.